Jeff Gordon didn’t want to get five races into the NASCAR season, look at the standings and see himself 18th in the points.

But at least Gordon knows what his Hendrick Motorsports team did last year. At this point in 2012, Gordon sat 25th in the standings. He rallied to make the Chase for the Sprint Cup and win two races—including the season finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway—for a respectable 2012.

Jeff Gordon's slow start in NASCAR's Sprint Cup standings has been a result of inconsistent cars and outright bad luck. (AP Photo)

“We’re fighters,” Gordon said last week at Auto Club Speedway in California. “We just don’t give up. We’re a much stronger team than we show in the results and this team is a tight-knit group.

“We went through this last year and came out strong. We just kind of hoped that momentum would carryover so we could start the season off strong. Don’t count us out, that’s for sure.”

While Gordon’s last year success can put a positive spin on the potential for a comeback, he obviously isn’t in the place he envisioned last month when the season started.

While the other three Hendrick drivers are in the top 10 in the standings—Dale Earnhardt Jr. is the leader, Jimmie Johnson is third and Kasey Kahne is eighth—Gordon’s team has had a 2012-like year where it has had bad finishes on days with a strong car and then other weeks where he’s just not on pace with the rest.

For instance, at Bristol two weeks ago, Gordon led 66 laps but blew a tire and finished 34th. A week earlier at Las Vegas, the team struggled and finished a lap down in 25th.

He has just one top-10 finish—a ninth at Phoenix—this year.

“We’ve got ourselves in a hole that we’re going to have to climb ourselves out of,” Gordon said. “We’ve got a great team and fast race cars. We can certainly do it again, but it’s not something you want to do.

“We definitely focused coming into this season on, even if we’re off a little bit, let’s get some consistent finishes so we’re staying up in the points and don’t get too far behind and here we are in a similar situation.”

Consistency, though, has been a problem. Gordon said he didn’t think the Bristol tire issue was because of setup creating excessive heat. He said when he was out front, he likely was a little harder on the right front tire because he had so much grip in clean air.

“We could probably run a little bit bigger hose to cool it and that’s something that we’re going to focus on a little bit more as we move forward here,” Gordon said. “Every year you find ways to create more grip and that’s what the team has done.

“There’s also always a price to pay with that. I think we’re right there on that edge of damaging the tire or melting the bead. I was not hard on the brakes at all.”

While scratching his head over that finish, Gordon believes that part of his team’s problems have been adjusting to the new rear suspension rules.

The Hendrick teams had done extensive work with the rear sway bars to make the cars handle well in the turns. This year, the cars don’t have those rear sway bars, except for road courses.

“The rear sway bar I think has played a role for us,” Gordon said. “We had that mapped out very well in how to balance the car out.

“It’s been a challenge for us to get the car to turn the center of the corner and have the security in the rear on entry and exit without that rear bar.”